The Necessity of Nature

After reading several of Hopkins poems, it is quite clear that he possesses the qualities of a Transcendentalist during the Victorian era of extreme industrialization. It makes sense that “because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime” (839). When Hopkin’s poetry was coming out, the Victorian novel that primarily consisted of social satire, was the heighth of literature during this time period. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Dickens’ Bleak House captivated audience’s by showing the social injustice of a socialized world.



Had the Victorian industrialized society not been obsessed with social satire at this time, Hopkins would have not only been popular, but influential. The sprung rhythm of the sonnet The Winhover helps to mimic the movements of this majestic like bird. The second stanza brings this rhythm to light when it states “Of the rolling level underneath him steady air. And stringing / High there how he run upon the rein of a whipping wing/ In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing.” (841). The first line of this stanza mimics the smooth, soft, and slow gracefulness of the Windhover. Then the second line mimics the quick rushing and daring that the bird is highly capable of. Since this poem’s purpose is to unite man with nature, the transition from slow to quick rhythm could be to acknowledge Christ as the creator of all great natural things – a symbol Hopkins consistently uses.



Hopkins begins to mimic the devout compassion with nature in the same way Thoreau did in Walden where “this compassion leads to a death wish” (848). He shares compassion with landscapes and “the extinction of species that environmentalists has never personally encountered” (847). The environmentalists never took into account that human culture was included in the environment. Assuming Victorian England to be pride of humanity, India’s cultural and religious beliefs were not only subservient, but ridiculous. It took people with a natural mindset to understand that “if Hopkins’s ‘excessive sensibility’ is a ‘weakness of character,’ he shares it with the hundreds of millions of people who have lived in India in the last three thousand years” (849). Understanding nature and respecting culture is not a weakness of character; they are actions of educated respectable people. Had this refreshing thought in a time of colonial expansion and industrialization been given greater respect, there may not have been a need for so social satires regarding to the unjust life in an urbanized industrial landscape.



Other writers such as the American poet Robinson Jeffers showed man’s blindness to nature in their poetry as well. Hurt Hawks shows the greatest degree of compassion that man can feel. The hawk is “strong and pain is worse than strong, incapacity is worse”( 910). Thus, the bird is so strong that it will live in complete pain even though death would be much easier. The speaker uses the first section of the poem to describe the pain the hawk is in with vivid imagery. The close of this section reads that “You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him,” to show man’s lack of compassion to recognize the hawk’s pain or do anything about it. In the second section, the speaker does something about the poor hawk’s pain and “gave him the lead gift in the twilight” to end his misery (910).




Both of these writers take man’s inability to deal with nature and put it on paper in ways that the most speciest person can understand. Written at times when a link to nature would be the most crucial, the poems did not gain recognition until industrialization and urbanization had taken its tole.